Even as a computational biologist, I really have no idea what they are planning on doing from reading this.

I can guess that they will be using models of regulation (and maybe metabolism if they are good, like this: https://simtk.org/home/ifba ) to aid in the design of some phenotype (function).

Biologically, they will probably be putting a lot of the transcriptional regulators under control of non-metabolic chemicals like doxycycline, though I wonder how many different chemical regulators they could use. If they really wanted to make this cell very programmable, they would need a lot. However, they could potentially engineer the TFs to use combinations of several such chemicals, and 10 chemicals could give you 2^10 - 1 = 1023 different signals, which is already a large portion of the E. coli genome. This approach would involve the overlap of signals (i.e. a superset would regulate a subset) so it probably wouldn't be so useful.

A eukaryotic cell that could use shRNA to turn off any mRNA signal seems like it may allow more flexibility, though perhaps they could engineer in a DICER complex to E. coli (this was done in a baker's yeast about a year ago, but that is also eukaryotic...). This is probably a pretty inefficient way of programming though, since it would assume the default signals were "ON", which would result in a lot of RNA loss and I think shRNA is probably not so cheap iirc.

As for Solaris 11, I just updated my home server system to it last night while playing Skyrim. There seem to be quite a few differences in Solaris 11 and the last dev release of Nevada I was using. The news threads these days are hitting very close to home ...